Dash Navigation - Hands On
Dash Navigation is planning a launch of their internet connected GPS device in the new year, and I was fortunate enough to take a ride with the unit last week and two folks from Dash, Gina Bender, Director of Communications and Eric Klein, Senior Director of Product Marketing. The newly designed unit is sure to be on display at CES 2008, and I was able to see first hand what's going to be the core offering of Dash. Dash also announced today that they are taking pre-orders for the unit at their website, with delivery happening in the first quarter of the year. The unit will cost $599, and will have a monthly subscription rate as low as $9.99 with 2-year commitment.
Connectedness is the key premise of offering a better user experience, allowing for updated maps, internet connected fuzzy logic search, the ability to "Send to GPS" addresses from any internet browser that you want. The Dash website has also been updated to provide some online capabilities so that you can configure your unit and save certain data sources and searches at your "My Dash" page.
Traffic alert and planning features are pretty important next generation offerings that are enabled by the design choices made by Dash. Not only did they pre-load historical speed data from Inrix, but because you are connected, you can receive traffic alerts that
are generated by other Dash users out on the roads. We were driving around Boston today and with about 50 of the 2,000 Beta users (out of 53,000 applicants) on the roads of Boston for the last couple of months, we saw traffic patterns that those units anonymously reported in. Construction near us showed up in red at a local intersection and as we drove around you could see the "trails" that were reported by those beta users due to other small construction projects. Very cool and amazing.
Finally, when we were looking at the unit, an update came available, and asked us if we wanted to download it. Oh, yea, connected GPS gets updates where ever you are, if you want. You had the option to delay, but it just underscored for me the fact that this thing is going to be up to date and the applications will be tweaked to make certain that they are the best possible experience that you can get. I was assured that this was not a regular enough event that it would be annoying. This asked because we had just turned the unit on, and as it was booting, it checked for an update.
Dash asking for an update - Always up to date software and Maps.....
Stay tuned for more news on Dash, and look for them at CES 2008.
Below you will find a video that Eric Klein did recently which mirrors a lot of what he covered with me personally here in Boston.
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Posted by Scott Martin at December 17, 2007 6:37 AM
Coolest. GPS. Ever.
Read on another review that for traffic, besides historical speeds and live data, it also "learns your local bottlenecks as you drive."
Any experience with or additional info on this feature?
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Brian,
Oh-yea. Take a look at the picture above. That dashed road in red is a road that has had construction on and off for a while. Definitely a local bottle neck. People are also using this tiny road because the main road has a bridge out and under construction a block over.
Clearly one of the 50 testers in Boston used this road and sat there in traffic recently and laid down some bad "Red" indicators for traffic. Go Google Map Melcher St in Boston and get down to the Street Level view and see look at the truck sticking out into the street; this is a tight street and articulated buses crawl up this street! Very slow.
Part of the Dash encoding has the "certainty" indicated by the type of line - from more solid to more dotted, leaving you with an impression of certainty of the data. The older the data, the more dotted/dashed it becomes.
Dash has the ability to cut the road segments very finely; and can see back-ups due to street lights and stop signs in the data that they capture from Dash units driving around. So all or a sudden you can see the gridlock start to form as the lines would start to be apparent at troublesome stop lights.
The possibilities are pretty out there, as you start to consider future time of day planning, and the ability to program in a "Need to be at Destination by XX:XX time" and plan the trip to be there while making sure traffic doesn't make you late.
How about the I need to head to this place anytime within the next two hours. When is the best time to leave?
Very Cool indeed.
-Scott
If one does not have a subscription how much functionality is lost overall? Since it can pick up data from Wifi hotspots I would assume this would still be useful even without the GPRS connection. My question would be whether they would still push down map updates etc if one was using this without a subscription and just connected periodically over Wifi.
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Mark,
I believe that the subscription is NOT just for the GPRS capability but really for the update capability over WifFi OR GPRS. So, in essence either you can get the unit as is (which with the pre-loaded Inrix data would be pretty good), or you can pay the subscription fee and get updates frequently over the air GPRS, or over WiFi.
-Scott
It's really pretty sad that mid February has passed and we've heard nearly nothing from Dash concerning our units. We've spend hundreds of dollars and they don't even respect their customers enough to say "we are pushing out again". Instead, they finally updated their blog wanting to play games - in fact, the've gone as far to ask their customers "what is you best Dash experience" ARE THEY KIDDING??? Maybe instead of joking, they should be updating their customers about the shipping date of these devices we've paid hundreds of dollars for.
When this device was originally slated for release in early 2007, it was revolutionary, but now many other players in the game have either caught up, or are just about to; and we've seen 3D maps from them. Dash needs to stop joking, grow up and realize that their fate lies in making happy customers, as they have a very expensive gps unit, and the only way to get people who are teetering to buy, are good words from their initial customer base.
I still believe that the Dash is going to be a good product, and I am willing to back them if they treat me like they actually care about me as a customer, but I am starting to look around at other offerings and pricing to possibly come up with a cheaper alternative with similar features.
Besides - what's the hold up?? I though they could release software updates to us seemlessly as needed!
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